|
|
Origins
Released on June 25, 1982, written by Hampton Fanchers and David Peoples, and directed by Ridley Scott, Blade Runner was a total box office bust but it's design brought some publicity to the Science Fiction genre. It then quickly brought the film a cult following and status (2). The film is based on a novel called "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" by Philip K. Dick. Bladerunner was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant (1)." There have been seven versions of this film released, and because of this it was one of the first movies on DVD. A final cut of the film was made in 2007 on blu-ray and HDDVDfor the 25th anniversary.
The Film
The film tells the story of a man named Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) who is a former bladerunner, and several of the replicants that he is following. Replicants in the film are androids, meaning robots that mimic and behavior and sometimes become more human in the sense that they begin to feel since they were never meant to. The androids were created for colonizing jobs in space fore Earth. Deckard's job as a bladerunner required him to hunt down those replicants that had gone rogue and began disobeying their programming. Blade runners were not meant to feel either, as required by their jobs. This leads many to believe, along with all of the other evidence in the film, that Deckard may not be human but a replicant. This is only one of the many readings of this character and movie. The film is definitely a science fiction film and has definitive ties to film-noir because of the dark detective storyline. It has many scenes where the light is dark and their are many shadows present contributing to it's gritty narrative and nature.
(Clips and interpretations of mise en scene and such)
Cultural Influence
Though not very popular at it's release, Blade Runner has since influenced many types of games, such as the role-playing adventure game Shadowrun, video games, T.V. shows such as Battlestar Galactica, and their creators. It has also become called the greatest scifi movie of all time by many. It has been widely used in film study courses and was called the 2nd most visually influencing films by the Visual Effects society. This great film also comes with a curse though. Many companies that were very successful and had their products in the movie suffered from setbacks in the years that followed. This includes Atari, which never recovered the next year's downturn and RCA that had a big part of their company disbanded because of lack of funds(1).
(1). "Blade Runner Overview -." AllMovie. Web. 18 Nov. 2009. <http://www.allmovie.com/work/5994>.
(2). "Blade Runner -." Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Web. 18 Nov. 2009. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner>.